11 May 2013
Disarm
In 2003 a competition was held to name and produce a logo for a online Pokemon tournament at a now-discontinued website. This was my entry:
It won.
17 April 2013
Rat
This this undercurrent of fear in Seattle, in certain circles anyway, that the city is losing its grit and charm. Rents up are, offices are replacing warehouses, and NOTICE OF LAND USE signs invariably announce the replacing some smaller structure with a seven-story apartment building with ground-level retail.
I work at the epicenter of one of the more impacted neighborhoods in the city. Depending on who you believe it's either an erstwhile dead warehouse district that now bustles with the activity of medical and software offices or a great place for antiques and dive bars ruined by senseless demolition and yuppification. Still being new to the city, my own frame of reference is both limited and meaningless. However, in any event, it has a pristine newness to it that's hard to find in the rest of the city.
But the other night, I was walking home from a bar and realized I needed to pee something fierce. I was really close to my office and figured I'd swing by there. But that's actually way too casual a way to put it. I was running there, quite literally, in fear of disastrous consequences.
I was running by a small bush when I got the distinct feeling that something collided with my foot. I didn't really pay it much mind, I figured it was probably trash or a branch or something. But that changed quickly. There was an awful piecing squealing sound. What I had kicked was definitely alive, some fucking mouse or rat or possum. And it was sounding a warning to its kind, maybe even making one last agonized cry, or maybe screeching at me with pure contempt. For a brief moment I stopped dead in my tracks, before my bladder forced me on.
By the time I made my way back past the spot, there were no clues of what happened. But, fuck proof, I kicked a rat walking home from a bar. And no thoughts were had about $10 food truck burgers, or streetcars, or ground-level retail, because on that day Seattle felt as gritty as fuck.
I work at the epicenter of one of the more impacted neighborhoods in the city. Depending on who you believe it's either an erstwhile dead warehouse district that now bustles with the activity of medical and software offices or a great place for antiques and dive bars ruined by senseless demolition and yuppification. Still being new to the city, my own frame of reference is both limited and meaningless. However, in any event, it has a pristine newness to it that's hard to find in the rest of the city.
But the other night, I was walking home from a bar and realized I needed to pee something fierce. I was really close to my office and figured I'd swing by there. But that's actually way too casual a way to put it. I was running there, quite literally, in fear of disastrous consequences.
I was running by a small bush when I got the distinct feeling that something collided with my foot. I didn't really pay it much mind, I figured it was probably trash or a branch or something. But that changed quickly. There was an awful piecing squealing sound. What I had kicked was definitely alive, some fucking mouse or rat or possum. And it was sounding a warning to its kind, maybe even making one last agonized cry, or maybe screeching at me with pure contempt. For a brief moment I stopped dead in my tracks, before my bladder forced me on.
By the time I made my way back past the spot, there were no clues of what happened. But, fuck proof, I kicked a rat walking home from a bar. And no thoughts were had about $10 food truck burgers, or streetcars, or ground-level retail, because on that day Seattle felt as gritty as fuck.
06 April 2013
What is the saddest song in the English language?
The saddest song in the English language is the The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down by The Band. The song is intended to be a Confederate soldier's depiction of the suffering and hopelessness in the closing days of the Civil War. No Confederate sympathies here, but in spite of that, the story of some guy fighting on the wrong side of history manages to be ridiculously sad.
The key element is the character of Virgil Caine, the soldier in question. Virgil seems to be a low level guy working on supply lane between Danville and Richmond. Personally, he's suffered considerably. His brother had been killed in the war. Virgil's not fairing a whole lot better, as he describes himself and those around him as "hungry, just barely alive".
Virgil's a fairly simple guy. He comes from a line of farmers and it seems like its of the sustenance farming variety; he isn't above chopping wood for some extra cash. Virgil probably doesn't really stand to gain much from the war. It's basically impossible to assign a single cause to the Civil War, but whether you're in the slavery, states' rights, or tariffs camp the war isn't about improving life for Virgil. He's tied to the conflict merely because he's tied to the land.
Virgil's fucked. The only way to end his suffering will be that his side loses. And through all this, he's utterly powerless. The supply train he's on is continuously having its tracked torn up by the Union troops. The situation is perfectly futile. He's in a conflict where he can gain nothing, has already lost basically everything, and can't do anything. And it's playing out over and over again.
Pretty fucking sad.
The key element is the character of Virgil Caine, the soldier in question. Virgil seems to be a low level guy working on supply lane between Danville and Richmond. Personally, he's suffered considerably. His brother had been killed in the war. Virgil's not fairing a whole lot better, as he describes himself and those around him as "hungry, just barely alive".
Virgil's a fairly simple guy. He comes from a line of farmers and it seems like its of the sustenance farming variety; he isn't above chopping wood for some extra cash. Virgil probably doesn't really stand to gain much from the war. It's basically impossible to assign a single cause to the Civil War, but whether you're in the slavery, states' rights, or tariffs camp the war isn't about improving life for Virgil. He's tied to the conflict merely because he's tied to the land.
Virgil's fucked. The only way to end his suffering will be that his side loses. And through all this, he's utterly powerless. The supply train he's on is continuously having its tracked torn up by the Union troops. The situation is perfectly futile. He's in a conflict where he can gain nothing, has already lost basically everything, and can't do anything. And it's playing out over and over again.
Pretty fucking sad.
31 March 2013
Exclusive interview with Gary DiSarcina
BREAKING NEWS: the Boston Red Sox baseball playing team have announced that Gary DiSarcina will manage their Triple-A franchise, the Pawtucket Red Sox. This news is actually really old. DiSarcina will wear some number between 0 and 99.
Being a first rate sports publication, the fuckityo.com computer website has an obligation to get the full story on this development. However, in the absence of journalistic standbys like a press pass, ambition, or the courage to call his agent, I will be posing these questions to Mr. DiSarcina in these hallowed halls and waiting for his true and honest responses.
Being a first rate sports publication, the fuckityo.com computer website has an obligation to get the full story on this development. However, in the absence of journalistic standbys like a press pass, ambition, or the courage to call his agent, I will be posing these questions to Mr. DiSarcina in these hallowed halls and waiting for his true and honest responses.
- One time I had a dream a riot broke out at Fenway Park and you strangled a man unprovoked. How will this affect the mood in Pawtucket's clubhouse this year?
- Which baseball player with the last name Johnson do you use as a euphemism for yours?
- If you're really from Sarcina, as stated by your surname, why am I holding a birth certificate, from Malden, Massachusetts with your name on it, you imposter?
- If you had to choose only one, would you describe baseball as "America's last bastion of homophobia, misogyny, and general redneck stupidity" or "boring"?
- Which advanced baseball statistic do you plan on ignoring the most this season?
19 February 2013
That was Framingham
I admit, I had a LiveJournal. It wasn't like most people's LiveJournals because in its early days, it largely existed to mock of other LiveJournals. Eventually, it evolved to the point where there was actual, readable content on rare occasions, but mostly it was kind of like the Twitter feed of someone trying way to hard to be an imbecil.
LiveJournals are an interesting piece of internet history. They're kind of faintest glimmer of a proto-blog, but just not there. I'd go as far as to say that it would be possible, but rare, for a LiveJournal to be a compelling blog. I mean for fuck's sake, it asks you for music and mood in every entry. It's just begging you to complain about your oh so terrible day. That's really hard to make interesting to read.
This post is basically two origin stories. The LiveJournal was a false start, both in this entry, and in my writing on the internet in general. It turns out there was nearly a singular inspiration for this blog. And interestingly enough, it was blog about the town that I'm from.
I don't exactly remember how I first found thisisframingham.com. I remember it was on some break from college. I want to say it was sometime early in the summer of 2007, but it could have been the winter before. A blog about someone's hometown--a place where I spent the first eighteen years of my life--shouldn't be this eye-opening thing, but I have to admit it was kind of a revelation.
To set the scene, I was very much down on my hometown around that time in my life. I had met some people who had grown up in more urban areas. So much more seemed within reach for them. Jump on a the subway and see all manner of things: a baseball game, a beach, copious food choices Meanwhile most of the year I was out in a picturesque rural college town where I could easily walk most anywhere I needed to be. When I was back in Framingham, I felt trapped. You didn't walk around in Framingham; it wasn't dangerous or anything, but it just wasn't designed for it. Everyone drove and not to any particular destination in town. For the evening, maybe you'd drive to a friend's house. You wanted to actually go do something? Sorry, gotta make the 30 minute drive to Boston for that. At least it seemed that way then.
I remember one day I was jogging on some fairly major streets in Framingham and I just sort of mentally lost it. Eighteen wheelers were passing me spewing diesel fumes into the air and every street crossing just seemed manifestly anti-pedestrian. At that moment, I had fixed it in my mind: Framingham was the worst of all possible places, it had the congestion and pollution of a city with none of the pedestrian culture and amenities of one. None of the charm of a rural area, with the same lack of infrastructure.
But This Is Framingham helped me get past that. The proprietor of the site was a woman named Michelle who actually lived only a few blocks from my parents' house. Much of the content of the blog was her visiting (often by walking) and writing up local restaurants and other small businesses within the town that I then saw as a wasteland. Sometimes it was just quirky observations: someone with a grill on their roof, weird old Coke machines in a laundromat, an abandoned arcade with mint condition games inside. It had a very optimistic tone--sure there were the gripes that too many storefronts in the very walkable downtown area were insurance offices or weird churches; Framingham was saddled with too much of a social services burden; and that the traffic was all degrees of bad--but it actually made Framingham seem like an interesting place where one could have reasonably good time.
This lead to a revelation. A revelation that in my mind was so important that I set up a blog and wrote the first post right away. The post was sort of a mild invective against myself. Here I was complaining about Framingham, but if I was so desperate for a nice place to run why wasn't I going to the expansive state park right in town? If I was so starving for restaurant choices why wasn't I going downtown and getting really good Salvadoran or Brazilian food? Were none of the pizza places in Framingham a reasonable places to meet some friends at while we were all bumming around our parents' places on summer break? And that's where Mediocre Expectations came from.
And though Mediocre Expectations is not with us today, this blog is an obvious spiritual successor. Even the old LiveJournal got in on the action. There was a brief period between Mediocre Expectations and this blog that it got occasional reflective entries. The realization that This Is Framingham forced me to have about my hometown made me want to reflect on and tell the stories of so many other events in my past and thoughts I'd had.
Now that I'm on the other side of the country, when I go home to visit my family in Framingham I feel I can genuinely appreciate it. I wouldn't want to live there, there's too much more to gain from living in a city, but I can still enjoy the townie bars that I wondered about in my youth and the hole in the wall restaurants downtown that do make first rate Pupusas.
That's why when I checked This Is Framingham for the first time in awhile, I was sad to learn that Michelle was leaving Framingham, effectively ending the blog. She cited increasing dissatisfaction with the town: problems with crime and the disappearance of small businesses. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the mostly subsided but still festering issues with gang violence that were responsible for at least one brutal beating downtown and more recently a school stabbing. Honestly, the worst thing that happened to me was a bag of change being stolen from my stupidly unlocked car. But that is Framingham: it's is not the everyone-leaves-their-doors-unlocked suburb. And it's not the pristine rural community or the bustling city. It's this weird stuck-in-the-middle place that's never been perfect and never will be. But it is so incredibly far from the worst place in the world.
And I'm thankful for being forced to make that realization.
LiveJournals are an interesting piece of internet history. They're kind of faintest glimmer of a proto-blog, but just not there. I'd go as far as to say that it would be possible, but rare, for a LiveJournal to be a compelling blog. I mean for fuck's sake, it asks you for music and mood in every entry. It's just begging you to complain about your oh so terrible day. That's really hard to make interesting to read.
This post is basically two origin stories. The LiveJournal was a false start, both in this entry, and in my writing on the internet in general. It turns out there was nearly a singular inspiration for this blog. And interestingly enough, it was blog about the town that I'm from.
I don't exactly remember how I first found thisisframingham.com. I remember it was on some break from college. I want to say it was sometime early in the summer of 2007, but it could have been the winter before. A blog about someone's hometown--a place where I spent the first eighteen years of my life--shouldn't be this eye-opening thing, but I have to admit it was kind of a revelation.
To set the scene, I was very much down on my hometown around that time in my life. I had met some people who had grown up in more urban areas. So much more seemed within reach for them. Jump on a the subway and see all manner of things: a baseball game, a beach, copious food choices Meanwhile most of the year I was out in a picturesque rural college town where I could easily walk most anywhere I needed to be. When I was back in Framingham, I felt trapped. You didn't walk around in Framingham; it wasn't dangerous or anything, but it just wasn't designed for it. Everyone drove and not to any particular destination in town. For the evening, maybe you'd drive to a friend's house. You wanted to actually go do something? Sorry, gotta make the 30 minute drive to Boston for that. At least it seemed that way then.
I remember one day I was jogging on some fairly major streets in Framingham and I just sort of mentally lost it. Eighteen wheelers were passing me spewing diesel fumes into the air and every street crossing just seemed manifestly anti-pedestrian. At that moment, I had fixed it in my mind: Framingham was the worst of all possible places, it had the congestion and pollution of a city with none of the pedestrian culture and amenities of one. None of the charm of a rural area, with the same lack of infrastructure.
But This Is Framingham helped me get past that. The proprietor of the site was a woman named Michelle who actually lived only a few blocks from my parents' house. Much of the content of the blog was her visiting (often by walking) and writing up local restaurants and other small businesses within the town that I then saw as a wasteland. Sometimes it was just quirky observations: someone with a grill on their roof, weird old Coke machines in a laundromat, an abandoned arcade with mint condition games inside. It had a very optimistic tone--sure there were the gripes that too many storefronts in the very walkable downtown area were insurance offices or weird churches; Framingham was saddled with too much of a social services burden; and that the traffic was all degrees of bad--but it actually made Framingham seem like an interesting place where one could have reasonably good time.
This lead to a revelation. A revelation that in my mind was so important that I set up a blog and wrote the first post right away. The post was sort of a mild invective against myself. Here I was complaining about Framingham, but if I was so desperate for a nice place to run why wasn't I going to the expansive state park right in town? If I was so starving for restaurant choices why wasn't I going downtown and getting really good Salvadoran or Brazilian food? Were none of the pizza places in Framingham a reasonable places to meet some friends at while we were all bumming around our parents' places on summer break? And that's where Mediocre Expectations came from.
And though Mediocre Expectations is not with us today, this blog is an obvious spiritual successor. Even the old LiveJournal got in on the action. There was a brief period between Mediocre Expectations and this blog that it got occasional reflective entries. The realization that This Is Framingham forced me to have about my hometown made me want to reflect on and tell the stories of so many other events in my past and thoughts I'd had.
Now that I'm on the other side of the country, when I go home to visit my family in Framingham I feel I can genuinely appreciate it. I wouldn't want to live there, there's too much more to gain from living in a city, but I can still enjoy the townie bars that I wondered about in my youth and the hole in the wall restaurants downtown that do make first rate Pupusas.
That's why when I checked This Is Framingham for the first time in awhile, I was sad to learn that Michelle was leaving Framingham, effectively ending the blog. She cited increasing dissatisfaction with the town: problems with crime and the disappearance of small businesses. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the mostly subsided but still festering issues with gang violence that were responsible for at least one brutal beating downtown and more recently a school stabbing. Honestly, the worst thing that happened to me was a bag of change being stolen from my stupidly unlocked car. But that is Framingham: it's is not the everyone-leaves-their-doors-unlocked suburb. And it's not the pristine rural community or the bustling city. It's this weird stuck-in-the-middle place that's never been perfect and never will be. But it is so incredibly far from the worst place in the world.
And I'm thankful for being forced to make that realization.
14 February 2013
Heart Cooks Brain
We have put a man on the moon. We have a remarkable corpus of information on how our own bodies work. Rather than adapting to our environment, we've adapted it to ourselves. Unique among species, humans have conquered their instincts to a great degree. We don't just act, we think. Then, we act. Or we don't.
But when that hidden instinct bubbles up, that's where it gets interesting.
I've heard my heart. Not in the sense that I just went for a grueling run or been sick and heard my pulse thudding in my head. I've heard it, squeaking, noisily passing blood chamber to chamber. I'm not unconvinced that someone else couldn't have heard it just as clearly as I could if they were in same room as me.
That's a triple negative.
I had no idea what I was hearing at first. I thought maybe I was congested, but held my breath for a couple of seconds. Squeak, squeak, squeak. There was just one possibility left.
It was weird. Consciously I wasn't really feeling strong emotion. Defeat, mostly. But on that instinctual level, the flight or fight response was pegged as high as it could be. Unconsciously, I was preparing for an altercation that didn't exist.
What a mess. Luckily, we've invented NyQuil, and instinct's victory was short lived.
But when that hidden instinct bubbles up, that's where it gets interesting.
I've heard my heart. Not in the sense that I just went for a grueling run or been sick and heard my pulse thudding in my head. I've heard it, squeaking, noisily passing blood chamber to chamber. I'm not unconvinced that someone else couldn't have heard it just as clearly as I could if they were in same room as me.
That's a triple negative.
I had no idea what I was hearing at first. I thought maybe I was congested, but held my breath for a couple of seconds. Squeak, squeak, squeak. There was just one possibility left.
It was weird. Consciously I wasn't really feeling strong emotion. Defeat, mostly. But on that instinctual level, the flight or fight response was pegged as high as it could be. Unconsciously, I was preparing for an altercation that didn't exist.
What a mess. Luckily, we've invented NyQuil, and instinct's victory was short lived.
31 January 2013
Shell game
I found myself making an unexpected trip to my homeland earlier this month. One night I was with friends heading southbound on the Orange Line. We got to State Street, I think, when reality started to break down.
A crowd of people got on the train. One was a teenage or early twenty-something dude with a magnetized board. On that board were three silver cups, turned upside-down, which he was swiftly shuffling around. A modern shell game! And he wasn't by himself. A good portion of the crowd he got on with was obviously associated with him. Another guy was trying to guess which cup the coin was under. A couple of girls were offering advice and egging him on. The whole thing was bizarre: it was as though a whole scene, en media res, was transported onto this subway car and unfolded as though it was scripted.
The guy won of course. Money changed hands. The girls cheered. You couldn't imagine a more obvious shill situation. The con pitched his game, "put in a hundred, win two." Comments from the girls on how it was such easy money.
One hundred dollars. People carry that much cash?
Some guy did step up. I'm not sure he was shill number two of the original party or if he was honest to god falling prey this ridiculous game. No one on the train was saying anything. Myself, I was giddy with incredulousness and just trying to hold it in until our stop.
Think about it. This is not 1920s Coney Island. This is not a Very Special Episode of an early-90s teen drama. That's where shell games belong. This is Boston, 2013. This shit doesn't happen.
This had to be performance art. Some improv group poking at the moral fiber of unsuspecting subway riders. Someone was supposed to call them on being such a mindbogglingly obvious con operation. Everyone would get a nice laugh and we'd all feel better about our humanity by association.
But once we got off that train--upon which I, in low, but frenetic tones, announced that that couldn't have been real--I found myself quite clearly alone in that belief.
But I'm right, right?
Right?
A crowd of people got on the train. One was a teenage or early twenty-something dude with a magnetized board. On that board were three silver cups, turned upside-down, which he was swiftly shuffling around. A modern shell game! And he wasn't by himself. A good portion of the crowd he got on with was obviously associated with him. Another guy was trying to guess which cup the coin was under. A couple of girls were offering advice and egging him on. The whole thing was bizarre: it was as though a whole scene, en media res, was transported onto this subway car and unfolded as though it was scripted.
The guy won of course. Money changed hands. The girls cheered. You couldn't imagine a more obvious shill situation. The con pitched his game, "put in a hundred, win two." Comments from the girls on how it was such easy money.
One hundred dollars. People carry that much cash?
Some guy did step up. I'm not sure he was shill number two of the original party or if he was honest to god falling prey this ridiculous game. No one on the train was saying anything. Myself, I was giddy with incredulousness and just trying to hold it in until our stop.
Think about it. This is not 1920s Coney Island. This is not a Very Special Episode of an early-90s teen drama. That's where shell games belong. This is Boston, 2013. This shit doesn't happen.
This had to be performance art. Some improv group poking at the moral fiber of unsuspecting subway riders. Someone was supposed to call them on being such a mindbogglingly obvious con operation. Everyone would get a nice laugh and we'd all feel better about our humanity by association.
But once we got off that train--upon which I, in low, but frenetic tones, announced that that couldn't have been real--I found myself quite clearly alone in that belief.
But I'm right, right?
Right?
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